


Reversed Beginning

by TheSpecialist



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:08:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26740102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpecialist/pseuds/TheSpecialist
Summary: The apprentice meets Muriel.
Relationships: Apprentice & Muriel (The Arcana), Apprentice/Muriel (The Arcana), Muriel (The Arcana)/Original Character(s), Muriel (The Arcana)/Original Female Character(s), Muriel (The Arcana)/Reader, muriel - Relationship
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

“Thank you,” the stranger muttered to the dirt floor. “Now go away.”

The request was so absurd it barely registered. Wren took a step back from where she’d set the man down on a stool and wiped her hands on her skirt to rid them of his blood and sweat. She looked around the firelit hut for the things she’d need to heal him. It was spare but comfortable; though a bit rough around the edges, it felt safe.

Right. He had been saying something.

“What?” she finally responded, distracted and still out of breath from half carrying him through the forest.

He lifted his head a fraction but didn’t look at her.

“I said go.”

Wren gave a disbelieving laugh.

“I’m not leaving you like this,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the numerous wounds decorating his face and torso.

He flinched slightly as her arm came toward him, then swiped a hand across his forehead as if to demonstrate that the weeping gash in his skull wasn’t serious.

“I’m fine,” he muttered, running his thumb over reddened fingers. “Leave.”

“No!” she said, louder this time. When he just kept scowling at his bloodied hand, she made her case. “You have a nasty head wound and who knows how many other injuries. You’ve lost a lot of blood, you can barely walk…I’m a magician, I can heal—”

“GET. OUT.”

The command reverberated against the rafters of the small hut like the roar of a bear in a cave. The sheer force of his raised voice propelled Wren backward until she knocked against what turned out to be a table in the center of the room. For the first time she found the stranger intimidating. Even crouched over in pain, he was huge, taller than any man she had ever seen, with shoulders wider than most doorways. Draped in a mass of matted black fur, they heaved as he panted heavily through gritted teeth, lip curled up so that he almost seemed to snarl at her through the shroud of messy black hair that cloaked his gore-covered face.

A whimper born of frustration, fear, and rejection escaped the back of Wren’s throat. The sound seemed to shame the man, and his expression turned human again.

“Please,” he begged, softly this time. “You have to go.”

But even as he implored her to leave, he refused to look at her. That turned Wren's fear to anger.

“Fine!” she shouted, kicking the leg of his table.

Infuriatingly, she noticed him flinch again. Surely _he_ couldn’t be scared of _her_? She snatched her bag from where she had dropped it near his hearth.

“Sorry to have disturbed you,” she spat, flinging her cloak over her shoulders. “I should have guessed you preferred to bleed to death alone in the woods.”

She turned on her heel in a huff and reached for the carved handle of the door. But before she could pull it open something cold and wet brushed against her other hand. She looked down to see Inanna staring up at her with massive, pleading yellow eyes. In the course of her dramatic encounter with the stranger, Wren had almost forgotten: Inanna had run all the way to the shop, had insisted Wren follow her into the forest, had led her to the bleeding man. They must have been friends. Perhaps she was his familiar.

Wren kneeled to scratch the fluffy sides of the wolf’s neck.

“I’m sorry. He won’t let me do anything for him.”

Inanna whined and lowered her head.

“You tried. If he goes to sleep tonight and never wakes up”—she said this part loudly enough for him to overhear—“it won’t be your fault.” She gave the wolf one last scratch under her chin. “I hope you’ll come visit me again soon.”

As Inanna licked her cheek in half-hearted farewell, a sound like clattering tin echoed through the hut. Wren looked up in time to see the stranger, standing now, collapse against the far wall, all of his considerable weight slamming his right shoulder into the unforgiving stone. His yelp of pain indicated serious damage to that side of his body.

Anger forgotten, Wren rushed to help him. He let her tuck herself beneath his left arm to lower him gently back onto the stool. As she bent to set him down, she noticed a kettle on its side underneath the table. He must have knocked it down as he tried to catch himself on the mantel before swooning, weakened from blood loss.

After retrieving and replacing the kettle, Wren set the only other stool in the room across from the man and sat down. She ducked her head to look him in the eyes, but they were still screwed shut in pain and possibly embarrassment.

“Listen,” she said with a sigh. “I get it. You’re a loner. You’re self-sufficient. You’ve got your giant muscles and your fur pants and your spartan house, and you don’t need anything from anyone.”

He exhaled sharply through his nose in some combination of annoyance and assent. He was listening at least, so she kept talking.

“But she”—Wren pointed at Inanna, uncertain whether his eyes were even open to witness the gesture—“asked me to help you. I’m doing this for her, not you. Alright?”

The man lifted his head to look across the hut at the wolf and held his hand out weakly toward her. She padded over, staring up at him with a doleful expression. He stroked the fur between her ears, then leaned down gingerly to brush the sides of her nose with his own. Wren caught snatches of their conversation.

“We talked about this,” the man whispered.

“Awoof,” Inanna replied.

Having evidently reached some mutual understanding, the wolf sat and leaned against his left side to buttress him as he straightened back up in his seat.

The stranger cleared his throat.

“There’s a rain barrel out back,” he said, inclining his head in the general direction.

Wren couldn’t help but laugh.

“Is that where you were trying to go?” Gods, he was stubborn. “Didn’t get far, did you?”

He grunted in irritation.

“I’ve got the water covered,” she said. “I just need a bowl and some kind of cloth.”

“Rag,” he barked, pointing over her shoulder toward the fire. Even so small a gesture seemed to cost him dearly. He let out a slow, agonized breath before continuing. “Bowl’s in the cupboard.”

She pulled the rag off a peg above the fireplace then moved to the area of the hut that seemed to constitute his kitchen. There was no sink or stove, only a basket of eggs on a wood block with a single cupboard hanging above it. In the cupboard she found two earthenware plates, two large, chipped mugs, and a wooden bowl that looked as if it had been carved by hand directly from a slice of tree.

She placed the bowl next to her stool and hovered a hand over it until water materialized. She performed two more spells, one to sterilize the water and one to warm it, then sterilized the rag. She felt the man watching her as she prepared her supplies, but he immediately averted his gaze when she turned her attention back to him. Rolling her eyes, she slung the cleaned rag over her shoulder and reached to remove his ratty cloak.

To her surprise, the man recoiled so forcefully from her outstretched hands that his stool slid back at least two feet, its wooden legs screeching against the hard-packed floor. His shoulders were hunched protectively, and he continued to lean away from her even after she had retracted her hands. She peered through the curtain of hair drawn over his face to find his eyes clamped shut. Wren's shock at his reaction melted after a moment into sadness, and she wondered what had made him so unwilling to accept help.

 _Or maybe_ , she thought, heat rising in her cheeks, _he just doesn’t want to be helped by me._ He would hardly have been the first person in Vesuvia to find her presence unnerving. But the idea that she could be repellant even to a man like him was particularly crushing.

But what did that mean, _a man like him_? It dawned on her that she had assumed a kind of kinship with him, based purely on snap judgments: that he was alone out here because people feared him, that he was ornery because he was misunderstood, that he didn’t talk much or make eye contact because he was weird. Like her. In an instant she had invented a fantasy about a total stranger, fueled by nothing but her own chronic loneliness. When had she become so pathetic?

“I’m sorry,” she eventually said, keeping her hands tucked back against her shoulders, palms up, where he could see them. “I should have asked permission.”

The man kept his eyes closed tight as if she would disappear if he only didn’t look.

“I promise not to touch you again without asking,” she went on. “I’ll tell you exactly what I plan to do before I do it, and I won’t do anything unless you say it’s alright.”

He wrinkled his brow and heaved a great sigh that sounded to her like a particularly fraught sort of resignation. Then he gave the barest hint of a nod, and Wren let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding.

“I need to get rid of your cloak so I can see where you’re hurt. Can I take it off, or do you want to do that yourself?”

He slowly uncurled from his defensive position and reached up, movements labored and stiff, to brush his cloak first from one shoulder, then the other. His careful maneuvers could not prevent another wave of acute pain, and he crumpled once more with a soft cry. She wondered if he had separated a shoulder or broken any ribs.

“Thank you,” she said, running her eyes over his newly exposed torso. He was beaten and bloody to be sure; bruising to his right side confirmed at least a few cracked ribs—

Then she noticed them, the myriad scars that already littered his body. Long, jagged remnants of slicing daggers. Shiny patches of virgin skin and puckered craters from badly healed burns. Knots from old puncture wounds inflicted by arrows and teeth. Her chest clenched in understanding: he wasn’t just solitary or stubborn or shy; he was traumatized. She almost forgot herself and stroked a particularly heart-breaking scar that traversed his abdomen. She could hardly stand to consider the cruelty required to inflict such torture (for that’s what it must have been; several of these injuries might have killed the man, had that been the goal). Nor could she conceive of the strength it must have taken to bear it. Why? Why had he been the one to endure this punishment? He was so…

But she couldn’t finish the thought. She didn’t know what he was. She only knew, somehow, that he couldn’t have deserved it. No one could have, she supposed, but he was…he was so—

He shifted uneasily, and Wren realized she had been staring for far too long. She looked up apologetically but he quickly turned his head into his shoulder, cheeks stained with shame. Wren cursed herself for adding to his discomfort. She wanted to explain that she didn’t find him pitiable or frightening or ugly, but somehow she knew he wouldn’t believe her. She resolved to do for him the only thing she could: if his scars bothered him, then she would make sure he didn’t get any new ones today.

“Can I come a bit closer?” she asked, indicating the space between their stools.

Another nearly imperceptible nod. She stood slowly so as not to startle him and moved her stool forward several inches. He continued contemplating the space between his knees. Awful as they were, none of the injuries to his body seemed to rival the gash in his head, so she decided to start there.

“I’d like to clean the blood off your face so I can see the cut better. Is that alright?” She smiled in what she hoped was a comforting way even though she knew he wasn’t looking.

“Mm,” came his wincing sanction.

She dipped her rag into the bowl of warm water at her feet. She extended it toward his face but paused halfway there, suddenly wary of startling him again.

He seemed to sense her hesitation and sighed through his nose. The tendons of his jaw tightened as he leaned his head forward just slightly. It wasn’t an invitation, exactly, but it was enough for her to close the distance and dab cautiously at the blood caking his forehead.

She was careful, and the work went slowly. The man kept his eyes closed through it all. He had tensed every muscle in his body in attempt to keep still, like the rabbits she passed in the forest who seemed to believe that she couldn’t see them if they didn’t move. But his passive processes betrayed him. She could feel his pounding heartbeat in her fingertips. His breath came hard and fast through flared nostrils. He practically vibrated with the effort to restrain some unknown reaction—cries of pain? His flight response? Or maybe it was disgust. She wasn’t sure, but when her thumb trailed behind the rag and made direct contact with his skin, he inhaled sharply.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is it your ribs?”

He finally opened his eyes. He’d avoided her gaze so assiduously in the time they’d spent together that it was shocking to suddenly be met with them from mere inches away. They were green, a bright, verdant green, green and so full of suffering that it sucked the air from her lungs. Her cleansing movements paused near his temple as she stared into eyes like the lush forest that surrounded them, equally haunted and lonely. She was instantly lost, beguiled by a sorrow so dense, so teeming, that it seemed to catch at her and drag her down, just as the barbed underbrush of these woods had clung to her clothes and hair as they'd made their way to the hut. Only at the initial prickle of illogical tears did she remember where she was and break the contact immediately, turning to needlessly rinse the rag in the bowl at her feet. She managed to compose herself as she wrung out the stranger’s blood, and when she sat back up she was smiling a false smile, and he was back to frowning at the ground between his feet.

“Can I keep going?” she asked.

He nodded without looking up.

She began again, swiping the wet cloth across a dark eyebrow. But it wasn’t enough now that she had looked into his eyes. She felt an irresistible need to comfort him, even if he didn’t want to be comforted.

“Can I…” She trailed off, trying to get him to see her other hand coming toward his face, only to freeze when he looked up and regarded it apprehensively. She stopped and demonstrated on herself what she wanted to do, turning her hand back and placing it along her own jaw. “Like this? On you?”

He looked more than a little distressed by the idea.

“It will help me be gentle,” she lied.

“Alright,” he practically whispered.

She brought her hand to rest against his stubbly, angular face and felt his teeth grind beneath her touch. His breathing hitched and he shut his eyes again to escape her apparently excruciating touch. She resumed cleaning the blood from his other cheek.

It was soon clean but she kept on caressing his face with the rag anyway. Unconsciously, she dragged her thumb slowly back and forth across another old scar that slashed down from a point high on his cheekbone before disappearing beneath the line of his jaw. Some part of her registered the guilt of taking advantage of an impaired stranger—especially one so averse to her help—but he didn’t seem to have noticed her prolonged ministrations. His breathing was slower than before, and he almost looked relaxed, though his brow was still knit in apparent pain. She leaned forward to inspect the cleaned cut at his hairline and he obligingly lowered his head, suddenly putty in her hands.

“I’m going to use magic to disinfect the cut,” she said quietly, trying not to rouse him from whatever trance had him so pliant. “Is that alright?”

“Yes,” he breathed from somewhere far away.

“It might sting a little,” she warned apologetically. “Only for a moment though.”

“It’s alright,” he affirmed. She felt the words where she still held his face.

Holding her hand over the wound, her fingertips grew minty cold with cleansing magic. He tried unsuccessfully to stifle his gasp at the astringent bite.

“Sorry!” she said, rising from her stool to blow on the cut.

“What are you doing?” he spluttered, practically choking on the question, his aura instantly alive with tension, muscles tightening into an impressively impenetrable fortress.

“It helps with the stinging,” she answered meekly, blowing across his hairline again in demonstration.

“That’s enough!” he croaked in the same strangled voice.

She sat down, embarrassed. “I'm sorry.”

He leaned forward to catch her eye, regret in his features. “No, it’s just…it didn’t sting anymore.”

“Sure,” she muttered.

She stood suddenly, and he leaned away in surprise at the movement. They were face to face now, and he appeared threatened once more by their closeness, though he managed to maintain eye contact. Her ego had been bruised by his response to her proximity, which she now registered with certainty as revulsion, and she found she no longer cared if he was frightened of her.

“I can heal it now,” she explained tersely, bringing her middle three fingers to rest along the cut.

“Fine,” he replied, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as she placed her other hand back against the side of his face.

“It shouldn’t hurt. It’ll feel a bit warm and…weird.”

“It's fine,” he said again, and they both closed their eyes.

Her powers had been much stronger lately, but healing magic was still the most difficult to perform. She attempted to clear her mind of all thought, particularly the distracting feel of his sweat-slick skin beneath hers, his warm breath ghosting her features, his thick hair that smelled like herbs and—

A spark of magic shot from her hand unbidden. Her eyes snapped open and she examined his scalp to find the wound completely gone—no scar, not even the slightest tinge of pink in the new skin. She regarded the healing instrument with wonder. She hadn’t even been concentrating on her magic yet, but her fingers still crackled with some energy she didn’t recognize. It was earthy and still and quiet, like the woods just after the rain. It occurred to her that it must be his.

Their eyes met, and she found in his expression an odd mixture of excitement and worry. He reached up to check the place where the cut had been, eyes never leaving hers. The corner of his mouth lifted almost imperceptibly when he felt that it was completely gone.

She watched him with suspicion, the aftershocks of needlessly powerful magic still radiating up her arm. Usually she felt depleted after healing, but now…if anything she felt stronger now.

She attempted to voice her confusion.

“Did you…are you…?”

He cringed.

“Are you a magician?” she finished.

Relief flitted across his face.

“No.”

Strange. Everyone had their own magic, of course, but she usually had to deliberately draw on another's power in order to join it to her own. Asra was the only person who had ever managed to combine his magic with hers of his own volition. She had always assumed that it was because of his training, but maybe there was some other reason—

“Can you heal my ribs now?” the man asked, derailing her train of thought.

He was not a skilled liar; she knew that his strained effort to seem suddenly eager for her help was intended as some kind of distraction. But from what?

“Sure,” she replied, feigning nonchalance, a plan forming in her mind. Cuts were one thing; broken bones and punctured organs were another kettle of fish. She usually needed a nap after healing internal trauma. But since his most serious wound was repaired, and in the interest of satisfying her curiosity, she decided to risk depleting her energies by healing his ribs before the more superficial damage to the rest of his body.

She sat back down on her stool and laid her palm on the large bruise blooming against the hot skin of his ribcage, fingers spread wide to reach as much of the affected area as possible. She glanced up to find him staring at the place where her hand met his flesh.

“Here,” she said, reaching across his lap to grab him by the wrist and bring the hand from his uninjured side to cover her own at his ribs. She placed her free hand on top of his to keep him from pulling away. Then she closed her eyes and tried to visualize his splintered bones.

“Wait!” he cried, realizing what she was about to do. But her eyelashes had scarcely met before their mingled magic again burst from her fingers. The man inhaled dramatically as his deflated ribcage all at once popped back into place. She ignored his hissing breaths and wrenched her hands away from him.

“Alright, what was that?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

He gouged his thighs with clenched fists to distract himself from the sharp pain of her uncontrolled magic.

“I’m not doing anything!” he managed to bite out through gritted teeth.

“I know you felt that!”

He cast her a look that mingled anger and bewilderment.

“Damn right I did!”

She tutted, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I don’t mean that, I mean my magic— _our_ magic. You keep”—she cast a hand about, searching for the right word—“participating!”

He shook his head and attempted a deep breath to get the pain under control.

“I’m not, I swear. I wouldn’t know how. That was always—” He cut himself off abruptly and froze, eyes wide but downcast.

“‘That was always’ what?” she asked, anxiety rising in her chest for some reason.

He took another, more even breath and raised his gaze to meet hers.

“Nothing,” he said. Hopelessness displaced panic in his expression. “It’s not…it doesn’t matter.”

She opened her mouth to object but the magnetic misery in his eyes pulled her down until she tripped and fell again into their bottomless gloom. She could not bring herself to force him to talk about whatever had brought that despairing look back to them and forgot why she had been interrogating him in the first place. Now she could think only of how much her stupid experiment had hurt this man who from the looks of it had already been hurt enough for ten lifetimes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding back a sob.

“For what?”

“For hurting you. Your ribs.”

She moved to pick up the bowl of water and swiftly carried it to the kitchen, an excuse to hide the tears she wouldn’t be able to explain if he saw them.

“Oh...don’t worry about that,” he said gently, clearly concerned over her sudden change in demeanor. “Doesn’t hurt anymore. You healed me.”

“I could have been more careful about it.”

She took a steadying breath and tried to compose her face into some semblance of normalcy.

“Can I make you some tea?” she asked, not waiting for his answer before taking the kettle off the mantel.

“You don’t have to, really, I’m fine—”

“Please?” she asked, a little more forcefully than intended.

He seemed to pick up on her desperation.

“Yeah…sure,” he said delicately. “That would be…nice.”

She magically filled the kettle and hung it in the fireplace to boil, then retrieved the bowl of water from where she had pointlessly set it in the kitchen.

“I still need to clean and heal these,” she said, crossing the room toward him and indicating the cuts and bruises to his torso, determined to be helpful.

He opened his mouth to respond, but the words seemed to die in his throat as she sat back down in front of him and immediately brought the damp rag across his sternum. She could tell that her sudden nearness had once again unraveled him; this time, however, rather than recoiling, he merely pouted and cast his gaze toward Inanna’s sleeping form.

Wren was gratified by this progress and briefly enjoyed the relative lack of tension between them. But a new kind of tension rapidly emerged as she worked. The more she removed the grime and blood and repaired his torn skin, the more difficult it became to view the man as a patient and not a brooding, handsome stranger whose ridiculous physique she’d been rubbing for half an hour. That the man seemed to have gotten used to her touch only exacerbated things. He was no longer pulled taut everywhere at once; instead, Wren felt him flex deliciously under her fingertips wherever she happened to be handling him. Occasionally in her search for recent injuries she would trace an old scar, and his breath would catch as if she had aroused some phantom ache. Every time she eliminated a source of pain, she was rewarded with a throaty sigh of relief he evidently could not help but utter (for she could tell he was trying to restrain himself). She expended far more magic than was necessary in attempt to bring him to a more complete state of relaxation and earn herself more of those lovely little noises.

It occurred to her that the soothing energy flooding his body might have made him more receptive to conversation.

“What’s your name?” she tried.

“Doesn’t matter,” he grumbled, sounding both annoyed and a little sleepy.

She laughed lightly. So much for that idea.

“Fine. I’ll just call you ‘Inanna’s friend.’ My name’s Wren.”

“I—uh, hello. Wren.”

“So, Inanna’s friend, are you from Vesuvia?”

“No.”

“Where are you from then?”

“You ask too many questions,” he said, but Wren caught the trace of amusement in his voice.

“Alright, I’ll be quiet,” she said, then added wickedly, “You can go back to enjoying these magic hands.”

He blushed crimson and stammered, “I—that’s not—I wasn’t…”

He trailed off in an indignant huff that turned into a groan as Wren sent a wave of enchanted heat through a knot in his obliques. He bit his lip to stifle the sound and tried to look angry at her. Wren flashed him a devious smile before quickly ducking her head back down to the wounds on his torso.

But in teasing him Wren had unwittingly compounded her own predicament. Self-consciousness and exasperation quickened his breath and his pulse; his heart hammered underneath her palms, and the muscles of his chest expanded and contracted powerfully right in front of her eyes, so close that she could almost feel coarse, black hairs tickle her tongue when it darted out to wet her lips. She inhaled the smell of his clean skin—

“Not here,” he said suddenly, breaking her reverie.

She looked up at him, hoping confusion would mask the guilt she felt for the turn her thoughts had taken.

“You asked where I was from,” he reminded her. “I’m not from here. But I’ve been here. For a long time.”

That hardly clarified things, but it was more words than he had spoken in a row since her arrival, so she decided to forge ahead.

“Do you have any hobbies?”

His whole body tensed and she looked up to find something akin to alarm in his eyes.

“W-why would you…what?”

She shrugged. “I’m just wondering what you do out here.”

His posture unwound slightly at her response but he continued to regard her warily.

“I don’t…do anything,” he said.

She cast him a dubious glance and he rolled his eyes.

“Whatever the opposite of _this_ is,” he groused. “That’s what I do.”

Wren smiled to herself. His grumpiness was highly entertaining.

“You live alone?” she asked.

“Yes,” he scoffed, as though that should have been obvious.

“But you must come into the city? To see friends or…”

She trailed off, unable to ask the question she most wanted answered.

“No," he said, in a tone clearly intended to end the conversation.

Wren stole a glance at his face, but it was determinedly neutral. She dragged the damp cloth along his spotless collarbone and admired the way it made his bronzed skin glisten in the firelight.

“Doesn’t it get…lonely?” she asked.

For a long moment the only sounds were those of the crackling logs and Inanna’s soft snores. Wren concentrated on healing a small cut on his fascinating bicep. The more time passed, the more she hoped he would just forget her question.

“I’m fine,” he finally answered.

Wren looked up to find another carefully composed impression of indifference. He raised his chin slightly in defiance as if he expected her to doubt his words. But under her inquisitive gaze the façade soon crumbled to reveal his true face, the archetype of loneliness. Etched by open longing, his already attractive features—sad eyes, serious brow, and permanently pouty lips—were rendered even more alluring.

He seemed to realize his expression had betrayed him and tried to explain.

“I’m not…I can’t…”

He shook his head and sighed in frustration.

“I have to be alone.”

Wren let the rag fall into the bowl of water with a soft plop. She observed his hands, dangling in his lap from the end of his remarkable forearms, and pictured taking them into her own.

“No one should have to be alone,” she said.

He smiled sadly.

“It’s…I’m glad that you think that. You’re…good.”

She didn’t care for being patronized; then again, he seemed utterly sincere. She opened her mouth to argue but he spoke up quickly to prevent her.

“I’m not good.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said, somehow certain he was.

His expression darkened and he shut his eyes.

“You don’t know me.”

Without thinking, Wren reached up to cup his scarred cheek again. The man’s eyes flew open at the gesture. There was no pretense of healing this time.

“But I want to,” she whispered.

Her words seemed to inflict more pain than anything else he had suffered that day.

“You shouldn’t,” he whispered back.

His instruction stoked some native spark of contrarianism deep within her. She was pleased to find that months of nagging self-doubt had not managed to snuff it out.

“Why don’t you let me decide what I want?”

For a long moment, he seemed to consider it. His brow remained drawn in agony, but he didn’t pull away from her. She watched as his pupils darted from her eyes to her chin to her eyes to her lips before settling on a point over her shoulder.

“Kettle’s boiling,” he said, sitting up straight. Wren’s hand fell from his cheek to her own lap.

“Alright,” she said, staving off disappointment by clinging to the new sense of purpose that had just taken root in her mind. Standing, she moved to take the kettle off the fire and carry it to the table, watching him out of the corner of her eye all the time. Unaware of her gaze, he raked a hand through his hair in obvious frustration and pursed his lips in a tight, rueful frown. It was true: she didn't know him. But she had looked into his eyes and traced his scars and felt his heartbeat against her palms. His body told the story. His home, a lonely, dignified hut in haunted woods, told it too. An unearned glimmer of pride brought a soft smile to her face; whatever horrors he had experienced, he was not broken. He was surviving. But she wanted more for him. She wanted to divest him of the blame he had apparently accepted for the cruelty others visited upon him. She wanted to correct his mistaken belief that the world would be a worse place for his participation in it. She wanted to heal him.

Starting with tea.

She set the kettle on a woven trivet and picked up a rough-hewn ceramic jar from the center of the table. The word _tea_ was neatly carved into the heavy wooden lid. As she struggled to unscrew it, the man abruptly stood.

“Wait, don’t,” he said.

Confused, she tilted her head at him. The loosened lid began to turn.

“No!” he shouted, rushing forward.

Wren was at a loss to understand what he was even telling her not to do. She pulled the lid away.

Before she could grasp what he wanted, the man had leaned across the table and batted the jar violently to the ground. Its aromatic contents scattered across the hut. As she stared at the stranger, frozen in shock, Wren inhaled the scent of lavender and cloves, so strong she could practically taste them, followed by invigorating cinnamon, earthy myrrh, and—

A barrage of images flashed across her mind in dizzying succession. The claw of a golden gauntlet tearing through his chest. An axe dropping from his trembling hands. His hesitant mouth under a prismatic sky. His dark hair threaded through her fist. His concerned frown from on horseback. His subtle smile across a card table. His wet chest. His safe arms. His neck in chains. His head thrown back in pleasure. His shoulders sunk in defeat. His eyes alight in victory. Wren felt the floor open up beneath her and gripped the edge of the table, hard; only the prick of splinters perforating her fingertips tethered her to consciousness. The nonsensical tears she’d been fighting ever since she’d discovered his battered body at the foot of a tree overflowed in an instant. They were beginning to make an awful sort of sense.

She shut her eyes against the waves of vertigo and spoke to the memories that filled her vision. “Muriel?”

The Muriel standing in front of her groaned, and she looked up in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of his anguished expression before his shoulders deflated and his head fell limp against his chest. His massive arms seemed to quake with the effort of supporting his weight where he leaned on the table.

Dawning horror crested the horizon of her brain. She shook her skull to dispel the unthinkable thought but could not prevent her lips from forming the question it prompted.

“No…Muriel…what did you do?”


	2. Chapter 2

_"Wren?”_

The sound was muffled, like someone was calling out for her as she drowned.

_“Please…are you…say something…”_

Oh, she wanted to. She wanted to scream until her throat combusted and swallowed her in flames. Instead she was frozen. She knew she must be scaring him, but when she tried to concentrate on opening her mouth, nothing happened. _Maybe I died again_ , she wondered. Then she felt the tears spilling continuously over her cheeks, thawing her like rain on old snow. She blinked a few times experimentally and watched fat droplets splash against his dirt floor. The sight brought her back to herself enough to croak out a few words in a voice she barely recognized.

“How long?”

Muriel frowned at her, regretting, perhaps, his late insistence on a response. She could tell he was thinking hard about how to avoid answering.

“I don’t…” His gaze fell to the tabletop. “Time, out here…” His knuckles had turned white where he gripped the wood. “I lose track—”

“Muriel.” It was the harshest tone she had ever used with him.

He raised his head slowly, buying time to wrestle his features into a stoic expression.

“Eleven months, one week, and three days.”

And again Wren felt the ground underneath her open up like a grave. Shock stole back her speech; this time it took her breath with it. She gurgled helplessly like the fish piled on the city docks, which she passed nearly every morning, always with a pang for their suffering. Now she was going to join them. But just as her vision started to tunnel, the air came rushing back fast, too fast. It was thin and frigid and unfamiliar to her lungs, and she felt even more like the dying fish.

“A year,” she wheezed, shivering. She shook her head as if to knock the awful thought out of her skull. “We haven’t been…I haven’t known you for a year?” she asked, eyes wide and wild.

She sensed that Muriel wanted to reach for her. Over months of living with him she had learned to anticipate his seismic shifts like livestock before an earthquake; much as he tried to mitigate the impact of his size through careful, deliberate movements, she never wanted to be caught unawares with a full, scalding cup of tea when he sat down next to her on his bed. This time, however, it was a false alarm. His bloodless fingers just kept on gouging the table.

“Almost,” he said.

Wren wrapped her own arms around her shoulders.

“Why?”

He sighed and his back managed to curve in on itself even further. Soon he’d be rolled up like a sari burma.

“Does it matter?”

She shook her head again in attempt to dispel this bizarre dream.

“Of course it matters! We were…I thought we were…” A screeching sound, something between a sob and a laugh, shot hysterically out of her throat. “I can’t believe this—we were together, Muriel! Weren’t we?” (Why wasn’t she sure anymore?) “If you wanted to get rid of me—”

“It wasn’t to get rid of you,” he said softly, finally stepping around the table toward her.

“Well, then why?” she cried, backing away. “Why would you…how could you take this— _you—_ away from me?”

“Wren,” he said, voice nearly shattered. He came a step closer, and she felt it again, the seismic warning, his hand coming as gently as possible toward her face…

“DON’T!” she shrieked, and he fell back as if she’d punched him. “Tell me why you did this!”

Muriel studied her for a moment, then abruptly crossed the hut and opened the door.

“Inanna,” he muttered, and the wolf trotted obediently into the forest.

He took his time closing the door.

“You went to the Rowdy Raven for Asra’s birthday,” he said while his back was still turned.

“Yes, that was almost a year ago—”

She choked on the reminder of how long she had been without even the thought of him. To distract herself from the horror she concentrated on conjuring the details of that night, but it was like dredging a bog. Whether that was a result of the evening’s particularly high spirits or a consequence of Muriel’s meddling, she didn’t know. Eventually, something emerged from the fog to bother the back of her mind.

“I thought you would be there, but…you never showed.”

“I was there,” he said, crossing the room to stand in front of her again.

Wren blanched, panicked that his spell was still wreaking havoc even on her restored memories. Muriel seemed to sense her alarm and clarified.

“I didn’t come inside.”

He was always so cryptic. It was probably unintentional, merely an effect of his reluctance to speak at all. But his deep voice and the slow, thoughtful manner in which he doled out morsels of information only ever managed to mesmerize rather than discourage his audience. Even as she recognized the mechanism, Wren drew closer to him, captivated.

He turned away from her rapt attention to gaze ruefully into the fire.

“There was a man outside.” Long, enigmatic pause. “He was…not in good shape.”

Hope fluttered frantically in Wren’s chest.

“Who was it? Did he do something to you?” Maybe that man had been the one to make her forget…

Muriel shook his head, and she deflated.

“He…he said something.” He tightened his eyelids against the apparently painful memory. “He recognized me. Not just from…you know… _us_ ,” he said, flinging his hand vaguely between them.

She knew he meant the part they had played in banishing Lucio. It had always made Muriel uncomfortable, being hailed as Vesuvia’s savior, as they both were throughout the city. Regardless of how true it was, he had thought of himself as a villain for too long to ever trust the smiling praise that now greeted him almost everywhere he went, though he had at least learned to accept it graciously. Alone with her, though, he would admit his guilt at having seemed to assent to the title of _hero_ , his doubt that he could ever deserve anyone’s gratitude—his alarm, even, that so many had so easily forgotten his crimes in the arena.

A sickening understanding rose up like bile from her guts at that last thought. Surely it hadn’t been something so banal, so predictably senseless, so eminently evitable, that had led Muriel to remove himself entirely from their equation. She was certain that no reason he could possibly give would justify his actions in her mind, but surely it was something better than _that_ …

And yet he had stopped talking, as though he thought he might have given her enough information to put the rest of it together herself.

Wren couldn’t bring herself to ask, afraid that giving voice to the ridiculous, tragic idea would somehow make it true. She waited for him to realize that she needed him to say it. It was a long wait, with her wincing in anticipation and him staring into the fire as if his misery was the fuel that kept it burning.

“He knew me from…from the coliseum,” Muriel finally said.

Wren almost managed to stifle the bitter laugh that greeted his confirmation. It was always the coliseum.

“He said…he told me that I—”

His voice broke, and the sound instantly drained her of any vitriol. She watched him grapple with his grief, watched him will it away from his features, like he believed it an insult to those he had harmed—like he hadn’t earned even the right to regret what he’d done to them, let alone to mourn what had been done to him.

“I killed his father,” he finally said, his diction precise, his expression neutral. Wren knew that his decorum was an effort, however misguided, not only to honor the life he had ended but to deny the feelings that complicated his binary view of his own nature. She let several moments pass, her own tribute to the dead.

“Muriel—”

“He was young. It must have happened when he was a kid.”

His brows nearly connected with the effort of holding back the tears that threatened his dispassionate façade.

“I took…I didn’t have…”

He scoured his face with a fist and emitted an exasperated yelp choked by anguish into a sound sadder than sobbing, a primal growl intended to condemn the very feelings that engendered it. Wren’s chest ached at the backwardness of his punishing and ultimately futile efforts to resist his own inexhaustible compassion, at how hard he had to work to seem at all like the monster he believed himself to be. He was stubborn, above all else. With all he had been through, all the choices that had been robbed of him, his desire for self-determination was understandable. It had led him to impose a life sentence of solitude upon himself and craft a lonely, tender little universe in the forest, free of others’ destructive whims. Yet that same willfulness also fueled an obstinate generosity toward every living thing he encountered. His humanity had not merely survived an existence marked from childhood by misfortune compounded with cruelty; it had grown as big and solid and strong as the rest of him. No matter how unfairly the world treated him, no matter how much he mistrusted or feared it, he never became callous toward it, only more and more solicitous. Reverent. Peaceful. He was the kindest man she had ever known.

If only he could appreciate himself half so much. Instead, she watched him attempt to smother the very thing that made him so impressive, so good. It seemed to be working. His muscles were coiled tight with denial, veins raised below the skin and practically vibrating with the furious beating of a heart whose contents he refused to express. His face, however, was resoundingly blank, like a plaster cast from a corpse. He was gone, buried deep beneath the duff, held down by the dead weight of countless bodies whose crushing pressure had long since grown more comforting than the hope that he could ever crawl out from under them and feel joy, let alone cause it.

“My family was taken from me,” he finally droned, eyes boring determinedly into hers. “And I took his family from him.” He might have been reciting the alphabet.

Wren thought for a long time about how to respond to his revelation. She was sure that simply explaining that he was being ridiculous would only lead him to dig his heels in further. But building him up, telling him what a wonderful person she thought he was, also rarely worked in these situations; compliments were far more likely to send him shriveling deeper into his self-deprecating shell than to convince him of his worth.

“I’m so sorry, Muriel,” she finally said. “I can’t imagine what it must feel like. It’s not something…I don’t expect it will ever be completely behind you.”

He turned away to scowl into the fire again. She kept trying.

“You know far more about living with a past than I ever will.”

At that he briefly glanced at her from out of the corner of his eye. He had always felt—inexplicably to her—personally responsible for her amnesia after Asra’s ritual; then again, he seemed to assume responsibility for virtually every bad thing that befell anyone. Yet if that were really true, she thought as anger welled up inside her once more, then how could he have done this to her? How could he have erased the best of the few memories she had collected since her resurrection?

“Look,” she said, less patiently now. “I’m sure it was horrible being face to face with someone who—with a victim. But you’re a victim too! And we already knew this wouldn’t just end. The people Lucio hurt are still out there, there’s still damage to be repaired. I don’t see how this man changes anything, why you felt you had to—”

“That wasn’t all he said.”

Wren curled her hands into tight fists to restrain herself from rolling her eyes at his dramatic manner.

“What did he say, Muriel?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“He asked me,” he said, now sulking more than scowling at the fire, “if I had any family…if someone like me—if there was anyone I loved.”

He turned to face her.

“I must have…I could see you, through the window, and I m-must have glanced at you,” he said despondently. “I couldn’t help it, and h-he followed—he could tell where I was looking.”

“Oh, Muriel…”

“He said…he asked me if I thought it was fair, that I should get to have…you, when he didn’t have his father. I said it wasn’t, and he—he agreed.”

The combination of terror and sadness in his expression would have shattered Wren’s heart if she hadn’t been so disappointed in him.

“He looked through the window at you again,” Muriel continued, “like he was making sure to remember. He told me he would see me around, and he left.”

Wren shut her eyes. She was so aggravated that even the dim light of the hut felt like an assault.

“Muriel, he was drunk and angry—”

“He was right though,” he said, coming suddenly toward her. “It wasn’t fair. Not to him and…not to you.”

He moved to grip her shoulders only to abort the gesture halfway through so that his arms were left hovering awkwardly between them.

“It will never stop. I hurt so many people…maybe he wasn’t serious, but someday, somebody…you would never be safe. I thought—”

His words briefly caught on a dry, derisive sob.

“For a while, I thought maybe…I bought into it…”

A timid sort of hope broke briefly in his stormy irises, but the gloom returned in an instant.

“ _Redemption_ ,” he spat. “But what I did…nothing will ever make up for it.”

“ _Muriel_ ,” Wren whined, rubbing her temples.

“I know,” he said, attempting a contrite little smile. “I know you saw good in me. You made me see it too. I’m…grateful, for that.”

He ducked his head, as much as he could, to catch her eye and make her believe.

“But it doesn’t change things,” he said, when she finally looked at him. “Not really.”

Wren was silent for a moment. She could tell from his ever-so-slightly patronizing manner that he thought he was offering an inconvenient truth rather than a pretext for self-loathing. That emboldened her.

“This is exactly how you ended up in the coliseum.”

“What?” he said, eyes flashing with hostility that belied his tale of woe. In spite of his outward eagerness to take the blame for any calamity, he didn’t seem happy with the suggestion that he had put himself _there_.

“You always do this,” Wren continued. “When are you going to learn that it doesn’t work?”

“What are you talking about?”

“When has being alone ever made you safer, Muriel? Were you better off when you were alone on the streets, before you met Asra?”

“Don’t you get it? It’s because I…knew Asra that Lucio was able make me do those things.”

“You’re wrong,” Wren countered. “Lucio was able to prey on you and Asra because he separated you. If you had just talked to each other, you would have known that Asra was fine, Lucio wouldn’t have been able to manipulate you.”

“You weren’t there,” Muriel growled.

“And living alone out here, what did that accomplish?” Wren asked, ramping up her argument. “Did it stop Lucio from coming back, from killing the Heart of the Forest, from nearly killing you? We stopped him together, Muriel. Why do you still think you’re safer alone? You would have died today if Inanna hadn’t been with you!”

“I’m not doing this for me!” he shouted. “You think I’m trying to protect myself? I’m protecting you!”

“I didn’t ask you to!”

“I DON’T CARE!” he roared. “I don’t care if you’re happy to endanger yourself, I can’t let you do it. I can’t be the reason you’re—that you aren’t…”

The words died in his heaving chest, and suddenly it was just like before. Like they were out on the steppe in the pitch black before the aurora, before he’d lost his chains, before he’d ever left this hut. Like he was still that same petrified man in his petrified woods. She wasn’t the only one who had forgotten who he was.

“I know,” she said, turning up her palms to signal a ceasefire. “I know, sweetheart, but…I thought we were past—I thought you understood. You’re still acting like whatever you love will be used against you—”

“Weren’t you listening? That’s exactly what he did!”

“But that doesn’t mean you just stop loving me—”

“Of course not, but if I can keep you safe—”

“Muriel, why won’t you believe that being with you doesn’t hurt me?” she wailed, abandoning their armistice. “For the love of—you’re the reason I’m here! You’re the reason I’m still alive! Do you really think I would have stood a chance against Lucio without you? We protect each other, remember? You could have come to me, you could have told me about the man outside the Raven, we could have figured it out together. Instead you did his job for him.”

“I couldn’t,” he whispered, and the desolation in his voice was like a tiny apocalypse, erasing their future just as he had attempted to erase their past.

“Even if I believed it—” she tried, her own speech shredded by desperation. “Even if I believed that being with you put me at risk—what kind of life are you trying to save me for? One without you? Is it really worth it, if you have to be alone forever? If we can’t be together?”

She reached up to rest her hands on his chest, but he deftly, lightly caught her by the wrists. Slowly, he brought her arms back down to her sides and slid out of their near embrace. Moving to the fireplace, he leaned on one forearm against the mantel and stared into the flames.

Wren shook her head in disbelief.

“You’d do it again, wouldn’t you?”

Muriel didn’t respond, just continued looking silently into the fire. The clenching tendons of his jaw animated the shadows along his shifting cheekbones. It was answer enough.

It was a strange sensation, to be returned abruptly, violently, to one’s real life. Wren didn’t think she would ever get used to it, even if it happened to her a third time, even if it was her destiny to continuously lose and regain. Still, that was a cycle she knew she could endure. But this…. She had never lost and gained and lost again in such quick succession. This was a new, far more disorienting ride, and she didn’t know if she could hold on.

“How did you do it?” she asked, to keep from retching. “Asra…”

The track plummeted without warning.

“Asra helped you, didn’t he?” she breathed, tears gathering. “H-how could he…how could he let—how could he not tell me—”

“You think the two of you are the only magicians in the world?” said Muriel, still eyeing the fire.

“W-what are you saying?”

“Asra doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember me either.”

The horrors of this day were inexhaustible, it seemed.

“Good gods, Muriel! Asra too?”

She had been wrong: it wasn’t the same as before, it was worse. He didn’t even have Asra now. She staggered until her back met the wall of the prison he’d built for himself.

“I really thought things were different,” she murmured, half to herself. “I thought you…”

“You thought I had changed,” he finished for her.

She cringed at the quiet indictment he slipped into those words.

“You know,” he said, “you say I’m not allowed to do what’s best for you, that I shouldn’t try to save you without your permission—but isn’t that exactly what you were doing?”

His raised voice, on the rare occasions he used it, was capable of scattering birds and breaking rocks, but it didn’t scare Wren. There was something novel, comforting even, about a loud Muriel, about any noisy show of passion from a man generally so undemonstrative. But he also had a tone softer than a whisper, deeper than a growl, one he reserved for his most profound resentments. He was uncharacteristically articulate when he spoke of his resentments. That voice flowed over his lips like lava, placid yet inexorable, emotionally annihilating anything in its path. Wren had heard it only a few times, but it unsettled her like little else she had encountered in her unusual life.

“What do you mean?” she asked, though she was sure she didn’t really want to know.

“I told you exactly who I was,” he said evenly, finally turning away from the fire to look at her. “I was fine, I told you to leave, begged you to, in fact.”

He took a slow step toward her, his posture more accusatory than menacing. Still, she found herself pressing harder into the cold stone at her back.

“But you didn’t listen,” he continued. “You thought you knew what I needed. You pitied me, like I was some—some wounded animal, this poor, helpless… _thing_ you could save—change. I was a project to you—”

“That’s not what happened,” she spluttered. The words were wetter than she expected, and she noticed for the first time that she was crying.

“I didn’t want to get involved,” he said, towering over her now. “With Lucio, with you, with _any of it_. But you thought it would be good for me. So I did what you wanted.”

They had entered new territory; this was a voice even she didn’t recognize, full of undeniable, smoldering anger that rained down on her like glowing embers after an eruption.

“But even after everything, you…you still needed—”

He faltered, like even he feared what he was about to say. It only took a moment, though, for him to reconstitute his fury.

“You never stopped _wanting_ things,” he snarled. “You kept trying to change me—talk more, dress different, go to balls and birthday parties. I wasn’t good enough for you, and you knew it.”

“No,” she sobbed. “You don’t get to do this. What, stealing my memories didn’t work so now you’re rewriting yours?”

“WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?” he bellowed, and she winced for the wall as his fist slammed against it over her shoulder. “I WAS FINE! I was fine. But now…you won’t—you won’t go, a-and I can’t—”

Wren just stood there shaking as his rage crumbled into grief.

“Why are you here?” he whimpered.

He brought his abused knuckles tentatively to her cheek, ghosting the skin there with curled, trembling fingers as he searched her face desperately for an answer.

“You’re always here. Why do you always come back? I tried to make you leave, I tried…”

Wren could only stare at him; the air was too thick for her to blink or shape her mouth into words. Only his shuddering breath was strong enough to breach the stillness.

“Please. You have to go. When you’re here, I can’t…I can’t—”

His head bowed just slightly in defeat and exhaustion, and a lock of his hair tickled her forehead. The sensation was so forcefully, achingly familiar that it reactivated her powers of speech.

“Then don’t,” she said.

And just as she had learned to do all those months ago, she foresaw the seismic shift while it was still merely a sparking synapse in his brain, felt his other hand cradling her chin in the instant before desire animated the muscles of his arm, tilted her face toward his before even the idea of kissing her had reached his lips. When he caught up, when his mouth pressed against hers in dubious surrender, it was almost like she’d never lost him.

Almost.


End file.
